Scarlett
My mind is halfway to the front of the store, but my body remains frozen.
I want to go, but I want to stay.
I want him to stop me. I want him to say something—anything. But I know he won’t. He’s the type that doesn’t fight for what he wants—the type that lets you slip away and then beats themselves up for it, probably forever. And I’m the type no one ever fights for.
It’s all so sad that I’d laugh, but I can’t because it’s sucked out the last dregs of my courage, my horny bravado, my everything.
Just leave Scarlett. He doesn’t want you.
I turn to leave. “Well, thanks for showing me around. Maybe I’ll come back for that haunted teapot.”
He laughs, but there’s no spark of joy in it. “Yeah, well, I guarantee it will still be there if you ever come back.”
“Yeah,” I say as we both shift to leave.
I should apologize. Apologize for being too much and not enough all at once.
Apologize for coming on too strong. For being too aggressive.
For breaking whatever was building between us, like I break everything.
For churning up that stuff about his mom—he obviously didn’t want to talk about it. For implying she was a piece of work.
I blurt, “Hey, Rory—” turning and ramming right into him.
He startles. Not a little. There’s no cute moo this time. This time it’s a full-body flail. He collides with a table holding some of his mother’s works, and, as if in slow motion, a teacup wobbles and rolls.
“Oh, fuck—!” I lunge, but I’m two steps too far. My hands slap empty air as the cup succumbs to gravity.
Rory’s hand flashes out, huge and beautiful and too late by a microsecond. The cup hits the floor, exploding into shards of red that make it look a bit like a broken heart.
The sound is biblical. My heart flatlines.
I’m frozen, waiting for the screaming, or the rage, or the tears. Waiting for the endless flow of insults and confirmations of how much of a fuck up I am. Confirmation that I ruin everything.
But none of that happens.
Rory drops to one knee, flicks out one of those cloths he seems to have an endless supply of, and places the fragments on it, like he’s about to perform some teacup mummification burial ritual.
My brain reboots. “Shit, Rory, I’m so sorry—fuck—I’ll pay for it, just—oh my god, that’s your mother’s—” The words don’t go anywhere; they just pile up in my mouth and clog the exit.
He looks at a red shard in his hand, then up at me with soft, almost tired eyes and says, “It’s okay.”
I babble, “No, it’s not okay, I broke it, I ruined it—” just like I ruin everything.
“It’s not ruined,” he says, gentle as the cotton cloth.
“What!?” I don’t believe him. Nobody would. It’s so obviously ruined it’s almost comedic. I gesture at the chaos on the floor. “It’s like, destroyed. I destroyed it.”
“Not destroyed. Just a little broken.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone so calm in the face of a catastrophe I’ve accidentally created. It’s the opposite of what I deserve. I wait for the other cloven-hooved shoe to drop.
Instead, he folds the cloth around the shards and stands up, dusting off his knees.“Scarlett,” he says, and my name in his mouth does something dangerous to my insides. “I can fix it.”
I blink up at him, confused. “Wha?”
“Would you…Would you like to see?”
I nod because I don’t know what else to do. I’m still in the middle of a full-system meltdown.
He leads me to a shelf just a few feet away, tucked away in a dark corner, as if meant to hide in plain sight.
The display is weird and beautiful and kind of tragic: pieces stitched together with lines of molten gold that look like lightning bolts. It’s as if someone made an entire line of ware, all with different purposes, patterns, and materials, but all devoted to Zeus.
Rory clears his throat. “When I was little, my mother taught me pottery, but…” He shrugs. “I was always too strong. I broke things. I’d spend so many hours crying over the broken pieces…feeling as worthless as I had made them.”
He picks up a teacup from the display. Its handle, once snapped off, is reattached with a gold seam.
It’s more beautiful than it would be if it were flawless.
“I learned to control my strength, to not break things…
but…everything breaks eventually. And the longer you love it, the more it hurts when it does.
“So, I learned the art of kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing the pieces with gold—when I was a teenager. Now, I don’t cry when a member of my herd breaks.
I embrace their flaws, honor their resilience, acknowledge their pain, their history, their trauma.
A break doesn’t have to be their end, but can be a new beginning. ”
His words hit a nerve deep inside me, and I swallow the lump in my throat to say, “It’s beautiful.”
His smile is small. “It was beautiful before when it was just like all the others. But it’s still beautiful, even though it’s different.
That’s why kintsugi really resonated with me.
I like the idea of embracing what others would call flaws.
Finding the beauty in what makes us unique.
And cherishing the parts of ourselves that we heal.
” He pauses, blushing. “We’re lucky. Our bodies can heal, but they,” he gestures to the whole store, “need me to not just protect them, but help them heal.”
I run my finger along the smooth golden seam of a blue cup. Suddenly, I want to cry, which is so not my style that it shocks me. “A beautiful scar,” I whisper, mostly to myself.
He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Sorry…I’m…I’m rambling,” and stares at the cup I just stroked. “I tend to do that…”
He’s got this dopey look on his face—the same one he has when he looks at everything else in this store.
Now I realize what the look is: love. He called them his herd multiple times, and it hadn’t really resonated with me how much he loves these things.
Now I feel kind of bad for jacking off that dick-shaped teapot earlier.
He sets the broken cup on a shelf, careful as always, even though it’s already broken.
“So, there’s no need to apologize, Scarlett.
It was an accident, and I can fix it.” He lets out a slow breath, and I swear I see his shoulders drop three inches.
“If I can’t fit the pieces together to make it whole again, I can combine it with others to make something completely new. ”
I trail my finger along another repaired piece, something that looks like it might have been a vase. But now it looks like what I suspect Dr. Frankenstein would have made if he had been obsessed with making pottery instead of people. It has at least four colors clashing along its scars.
I say, “You’re amazing, you know that?”
He sputters and straightens, shaking his head and twisting his apron again. “No, no. I’m nothing special. The art has been around for hundreds of years. I’m just…” he stops and looks toward the repaired pottery. “I’m just a messenger of sorts. It’s their story of pain—not mine.”
I try to say something—a joke, because that’s the only way I know how to deal with the nuclear reactor core that is my heart right now—but my voice catches.
Every cell in my body is screaming to not just fuck this minotaur, but make love to him. The lust within me has morphed to something much more tender. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still gonna fuck the hell out of him, but I also wanna, like…love him. Like forever.
He stands there, awkward and huge, and I feel like I see him for who he truly is: a gentle giant who needs love just like the rest of us, but is too afraid to seek it.
Because all the love he’s ever known has been fragile, something he could break just by existing.
No wonder he keeps his heart hidden within a maze of porcelain while making art that says, “You can be fucked up and still have a place in my herd. Nothing and no one is ever too broken to love, except me, of course. I’m big and unlovable. ”
I look at him: this massive, gentle, utterly unbreakable, utterly breakable minotaur.
He’s hiding his hands, trying to make himself look smaller, and I realize I was wrong about him.
He was never going to chase me. It was always going to have to be me who chases him.
Not because he doesn’t fight for what he wants—he does—his brand of fighting just looks different.
And for once in my entire damn life, I actually feel seen, too, even though he hasn’t actually seen me yet. I swallow hard and say, “Rory, can I show you something now?”
“Sure,” he says, but now that dopey look is directed at me.